Prince of the zoo: Charlie the chimp reigns at the Oregon Zoo

Jamie Francis, The OregonianCharlie, the dominant of the five chimps at the Oregon Zoo, has lived here since 1972. A succession of primate keepers have cared for Charlie; for 35 years it's been Dave Thomas.

He's partial to blondes, knows that guys in ties are authority figures and invented his own sign language expression for M&Ms: "candy berries."

At 39, he's deep into middle age, with wiry gray hair framing his face. His broad back is dusted white, but his long arms, thick shoulders and dominating ways make him the peacemaker among the four squabbling females he lives with. And he can be dangerously cantankerous. He's thrown chunks of wood at visitors to the Oregon Zoo, and once scored a direct hit on a radio reporter with a piece of poop. More frightening, he bit off the zoo director's finger years ago.

Schoolchildren point and shout when they see him. Grown men scratch themselves in exaggerated fashion. Others hoot at the evolutionary contrast of his humanlike face and hands and his ape-style knuckle-walk. "There's your uncle!" they jeer.

Yet zoo employees say he is studious, keenly intelligent and surprisingly cooperative. He inspires a loyalty humans would envy: Dave Thomas, senior primate keeper, has been his ally and ambassador for the past 35 years. And when former keepers come to visit after years away, he remembers them.

"I can honestly say he's a person who really changed my life," a former keeper says.

Another calls him "a stunning chimp, one of the nicest chimps you'd ever want to meet." Renowned chimp expert Jane Goodall was properly smitten. "You can see it in his eyes," she said during a visit to Portland in the 1970s.

Keeping watch atop his accustomed post, a wooden climbing structure in the chimps' limited outdoor space, he is a regal figure.

"Prince of the zoo," veterinarian Mitch Finnegan likes to say.

His name is Charlie. He's lived at the zoo since 1972 with a stable troop of companions, cared for by a linked chain of humans who have been his advocates.

But change is treading onto Charlie's territory.

Jamie Francis, The OregonianPrimate keeper Asaba Mukobi checks Charlie's finger, injured in a squabble involving one of "the girls." Flare-ups over food and pecking order are common among the emotional chimps, and Charlie often is the peacemaker.

Everyone has a Charlie story.

His began along the Liberia-Sierra Leone border in 1970, where an American mining contractor saw villagers leading a baby chimp down a road. His mother was almost certainly dead and the infant bound for the cooking pot as "bushmeat." The contractor, Edward Miller, bought him on the spot and named him after the mining camp's radio call letters. Charlie returned to the Northwest with Miller and lived with him and his young sons briefly before being turned over two years later to the Washington Park Zoo.

Happenstance had resulted in the zoo struggling with a growing collection of young, parentless chimps. Katie McKenzie, a receptionist with an anthropology degree, proposed an enrichment project to train the chimps to be a functioning troop -- and audaciously offered to lead the effort. To the surprise of many, the zoo director approved the project, and a corps of idealistic volunteers set to work.

Charlie had been a pet. Delilah and Leah had been removed from their mother, Coco, because at the time she did not know how to raise them. Then there was Chloe, a former circus performer who had been raised with humans and was confused and angry about being placed with chimps. Still is. Those five remain together, even Coco. She's 57, the oldest animal at the zoo and mother of two of Charlie's three children.

Thomas, with a psychology degree from Willamette University and intentions to teach, saw a local television feature about the project and volunteered in 1973. He spent his first day holding 6-month-old Delilah. On the bus ride home, covered in baby chimp poo, Thomas was overwhelmed by connecting with an animal that has so many human characteristics.

He was hooked, for good. He set out to learn enough to work with Charlie, the strongest, smartest and the most challenging of the chimps. McKenzie, the project founder, immediately recognized Thomas would do well with Charlie.

Oregon Zoo/1976Zoo staff, aided by a group of idealistic volunteers, taught a group of parentless young chimps to function as a troop. Charlie (first chimp at left) emerged as the group's dominant personality and remains so at age 39.

It was an exhilarating time. Volunteers taught the youngsters basic sign language. They put the chimps in custom harnesses with 50-foot leashes and took them out of their cages to climb trees and pick blackberries. A young, blond Brit, Marianne Yeutter, succeeded McKenzie as project director in 1974.

"There goes the phone, there go the papers," McGowan says. "Here's this young, vibrant chimp; he was absolutely beautiful to behold, massive strength. I'd scratch him, and he had this wonderful chimp giggle."

Yeutter, who studied on a grant at Jane Goodall's camp in Tanzania, believes that Charlie thought of her and McKenzie as his mother.

Which may explain Charlie's darkest moment.

Yeutter was talking with then zoo Director Warren Iliff outside Charlie's cage. Iliff had his left hand inside the cage, allowing Charlie to social groom him. Iliff was excited about something, and when Iliff's voice rose, Charlie reacted with lightning speed and bit off part of Iliff's middle finger.

As Iliff wrapped a handkerchief around the bleeding wound, Yeutter sought to retrieve the finger in case it could be reattached. It was stuck on one of Charlie's canines, and Yeutter plucked it off. It could not be reattached.

Iliff returned to the chimp exhibit the following day, attempting to reassure Charlie, but the chimp was inconsolable.

"Charlie was really depressed for a month," Yeutter says. "He'd hang his head and wouldn't play. I don't want to be too anthropomorphic about it, but he felt bad about it."

It had been 10 years since her last visit to the Oregon Zoo, and Marianne Yeutter Curington was anxious as she made her way to the chimpanzee exhibit one morning in August. She wasn't sure the chimps would remember her. She especially wanted to see Charlie, who had emerged as the group's dominant personality.

Thomas, the senior primate keeper, had encouraged the chimps to go outside to their "island," a grassy mound that rises in the center of high concrete walls. Thomas was certain they would remember their former keeper. His only concern was that Charlie and "the girls" -- Coco, Delilah, Leah and Chloe -- would get too excited. He suggested Curington visit alone.

Curington took a breath and stepped into view. Their reaction was immediate. Charlie clambered up a climbing structure as close to his old friend as possible. Reaching out a long arm, he gestured fervently, palm up, chimp style, teeth bared in a fear grimace.

Come, Come, Come, he signed.

He needed reassurance, which in the chimp world is a touch on the hand, and which Charlie's human friends can no longer safely give him. He scrambled to the girls and hugged them instead.

Veterinarian Mitch Finnegan is a Charlie fan. "He's more like working on a person than an animal."

Several years ago, he dropped in to say hello to Charlie -- "kissing the ring," he calls it -- after delivering one of the females back from surgery. Charlie was staring through the steel mesh at Finnegan's stethoscope, so the vet placed the earpieces in Charlie's ears and pressed the cone against the chimp's chest. Finnegan is pretty sure Charlie could hear his own heart.

"He got his head cocked over, and he had a very thoughtful look on his face," Finnegan says. "You could just see he was really interested."

Charlie's worst injury came in a fight with Bahati, a huge young male the zoo tried unsuccessfully to introduce to the group over a year or more. The staff was eating lunch when they heard a bang. Bahati had broken the welds on a door separating him from Charlie, who reached under the door with his left hand and tried to grab his rival.

Bahati took advantage, biting Charlie severely and shredding his fingers to the bone. Chimps are capable of inflicting grotesque injuries, as happened to a Connecticut woman in February.

"Dave thought he could get Charlie to let us do it with him awake," Finnegan says. At Thomas' urging, Charlie stuck his hand through a slot in the cage mesh, wincing but holding still while Finnegan applied medicine and cut away dead skin.

"He let us do it over days and days," Finnegan says. "We'd go in every couple days, and you could tell it hurt.

"I don't know that I would have even tried it with another chimp."

Meanwhile, Thomas asked one of his staff to sit with Charlie at night during the chimp's recovery. Katy Weil -- another blonde -- says she read Shakespeare to Charlie, and it seemed to comfort him.

Oregon Zoo/1977Dave Thomas, with a young chimp named Josie, began as a volunteer and now may be the nation's longest-tenured primate keeper. Thomas and Charlie, the zoo's dominant chimp, took an instant liking to each other and have been allies -- friends -- for 35 years.

It's a quiet afternoon. Charlie ambles in, knuckle-walking, as Thomas crouches outside the holding area cage. He immediately notices Charlie has a mouthful of water he intends to spit at a stranger.

The holding area rises above the public walkway out of visitors' view, a quiet place for the chimps. The door is open so they can see outside and feel the fresh air.

Sitting there, Dave and Charlie are like a couple of quiet, middle-aged guys who can see the approaching twilight.

Thomas acknowledges that many people believe chimps should not be kept in captivity. Humans and chimps share approximately 96 percent of the same DNA, and their intelligence, expressions and interactions strike a deep chord.

But the zoo's chimps had no alternative, Thomas says. Charlie had been a pet, Delilah and Leah had been removed from their mother, and Chloe didn't know how to be a chimp.

"Sure, we'd like to have Charlie still in the wild," Thomas says, "but his mother was killed and he was being sold for bushmeat."

Charlie has at least one grandchild, a female born in Dallas. He's outlived his son, David, and his daughter, Sara. His son, Joshua, is the alpha male at the Kansas City Zoo.

As Thomas talks, Charlie cleans his fingernails with a piece of straw. He pauses, neatly bites the straw tip at a 45-degree angle and resumes picking.

"Modifying the tool," Thomas says.

His favorite Charlie story is an easy choice. One of the females was in estrus and Charlie was interested, as he always is. Then, the zoo did not breed the chimps, and females were not given birth control as they are now. So Thomas kept the two apart, and Charlie was none too happy about it.

It had been a long day. He knew Charlie was mad at him, but he was in no mood to deal with a defiant chimp.

"He just sat there. I asked him about three times, raising my voice, 'Please leave.'"

Charlie pressed his fingertips together, then separated them, the sign for "open." Thomas hadn't opened the door.

"That stunned me," Thomas says. "I knew he was capable of that, but to forget the grudge and calmly tell me he couldn't leave. I had to sit down. I couldn't believe it."

Thomas is compact man, soft-spoken and unfailingly polite, but private to the extent that he often unplugs his phone at night. He grew up in Portland, the son of a doctor and a nurse, and has an older brother.

Associates say, intending no ridicule, that the chimps are his family. He may be the longest-tenured primate keeper in the country, and is greatly admired for his dedication and knowledge.

It's a shared affection. When Thomas recently missed three weeks of work with a bad back, primate keeper Jesus Gonzalez said, "There will be some happy faces around here when Dave comes back."

He meant the staff, too, but he was talking about the chimps.

Chimps in the wild seldom live past 50, but some in captivity reach 60. Charlie will be 40 next year, and with continued good health could live 10 to 20 more years.

Thomas will be 60 this summer. Retirement is in sight, but he's not quite ready. Change upsets the chimps, and he wants to see them through a major expansion of their exhibit, made possible by a bond measure approved in November. He's been the constant in their lives through many changes, including chimp deaths. His face clouds.

He had other opportunities over the years but says the chimps had him by the ankles.

"I could never walk away from this job."

But he knows he must, someday. He talks guardedly about passing the torch. He sees himself as a link in a succession of people who have treated the chimps with respect and affection.

"I would want someone who has that feeling, that connection," he says.

Jamie Francis, The OregonianCharlie (center) is the leader of a group of chimps that have lived together since the early 1970s at the Oregon Zoo, including (from left) Coco, at 57 the zoo's oldest resident; her daughter, Delilah; and Chloe, a former circus performer. Leah (not pictured) is also Coco's daughter.

Primate keeper Asaba Mukobi chuckles as Charlie roars and thumps the cage wall. Delilah, taking advantage of the boss's absence, is causing a ruckus out of sight on the other side but quiets down when Charlie yells at her.

"He's in charge, he has to respond to that noise."

Mukobi knows Delilah is the problem. "It's like your children," he says with a broad smile. "If you hear a noise in another part of the house, even if you can't see them, you know who did it."

The holding area is divided into caged sections, each with a metal door that can be raised or lowered hydraulically. Charlie is safely ensconced at the far end. Before raising the doors, Mukobi warns that Charlie may act up.

Charlie covers 20 feet in a black blur, screeching to a halt, throwing straw, screaming, bristling with menace and power at a visitor on the other side of the steel mesh. He is nearly 5 feet tall when he stands erect, with 160 pounds of hyper muscle, and a huge head and monstrous jaws. He could tear a human apart.

His territorial point made, Charlie calmly gathers straw to cushion himself against the concrete and takes a seat in front of Mukobi.

Mukobi, 34, is tall and slender, with a melodic accent and gracious manner. He is from Uganda, where he escorted tourists to see chimpanzees in the wild. He has worked at the zoo six years and came over to primates four years ago.

Mukobi is training Charlie for a medical examination. With a bucket of fruit and a container of apple juice as rewards, he asks Charlie to present, in turn, his eyes, ears, chest, knees, teeth, head, back. Mukobi pops a grape, banana piece or orange chunk into Charlie's mouth with each successful repetition.

"Shoulder, Charlie," Mukobi says, and the chimp presses his shoulder against the mesh. Mukobi places an unloaded syringe against the hairy skin, conditioning Charlie to the motion and touch of an object.

The newest wrinkle is "sleeve training," in which Charlie places his arm into a rectangular box clamped outside the cage. A top slot exposes a section of Charlie's arm where blood can be drawn.

Charlie gazes at a visitor as the training continues. The depth and awareness in his eyes is startling. He does the training willingly.

"It's always amazing when I teach him something new," Mukobi says. "Once we both click, he will do it."